Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:45:04 GMT

Researchers and their universities are beginning to realize that the online era has made it possible to enhance the impact of their research dramatically. It's no longer necessary to mail or e-mail reprints of peer-reviewed articles for them to be cited in others' research. Research can now be publicly self-archived in a university's Eprint Archives, making it instantly accessible to all would-be users worldwide, without the need to make or respond to reprint requests. Researchers, of course, have long since posted their papers on their own Web sites. But searchers had difficulty finding them using conventional search engines. Now, thanks to the Open Archives Initiative, the infrastructure for maximizing university research impact is already in place or at least available. Needed now are institutional policies and computational tools designed to create and fill the university Eprint Archives quickly. Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec at Montreal says universities need to adopt a self-archiving policy that extends their existing “publish or perish” policy to “publish with maximal impact.” A potential model for such a policy, along with free software for creating a standardized online university CV, can be found at: